ZaraDurden said:
You solve moral problems based on your genetic predispositions and your past experiences (just like you solve every other problem and make every decision). That is why morality is totally subjective.
I'm not sure why you would think since morality appears distinct from one's that it need be objective... If I am understanding you correctly.
Maybe I'm crazy... it's late, and my brain is numb... here goes nothin'....
Certainly your example only proves that moral
belief is subjective, and really doesn't address the existance of an objective moral absolute? That is, one can believe that murder is perfectly moral, based on a genetic and environmental predisposition, but that does not disprove objective morality (not that you were trying to prove anything, but bear with me). It simply means that, if morality is objective, then that person does not act in accordance to morality... that the person's moral beliefs are subject to an objective standard which, due to whatever preconditioning, they deviate from greatly.
Further, if many people have differing beliefs, or opinions, about morality, it could still be said that each person deviates, to varying degrees, from an objective morality. Even if that objective morality, or absolute, is not fully understood, the populous still adheres within varies degrees to that absolute.
SCENARIO 1: OBJECTIVE MORALITY EXISTS. IT FUNCTIONS AS A MORAL "MEAN" FOR THE ENTIRE HUMAN POPULATION
If this were the case, you would expect to find most human beings adhering to one or two standard deviations from an invisible, but nonetheless fixed "moral mean", if you will. In this hypothesis, you would expect to see something like this:
Certain core morals would be
held universal among most humans (say, not to murder, not to show cowardice, not to rape, etc). Whereas you would also expect to find many minor moral beliefs
to differ much more across the same population of people (business practices, acceptance of abortion, degree of racism/sexism) with variation being controlled primarily by the genetic and environmental pressures you mentioned before. Still other even less central moral codes would differ even more (table manners, distance of personal space). You would also expect to find wide variation in moral beliefs in beings that were bio-chemically or environmentally precluded from recognizing the absolute morality - that is, you would see psychopaths or sociopaths.
Furthermore, you would also find more differences between larger groups of people, where environmental and genetic differences have had more room to move more people from the absolute morality. For example, you would see Western Culture, Far Eastern Culture, Middle Eastern Culture differ the most between themselves, but fewer deviations within the major culture (e.g. Americans and Western Europeans tend to share common morality under the "Western Culture" umbrella).
In this scenario, you would expect to see most people (within 2 deviations of a mean), proscribe to common "major" morals. These morals are considered "major" only due to their commonality among most people in the total population of beings. Further, you would expect groups with the most deviation from "major" morals to become increasingly smaller the further those groups deviated from the more commonly accepted morality. For example, with a moral absolute of "murdering innocents is wrong" you would expect terrorist groups in all major forms of culture, but to be small in number and a representatively small part of the population of the larger culture group. In this sense, you would also expect to see subcultures within subcultures within larger cultures, all decreasing in size as their moral beliefs (primary or lesser) deviate from the parent culture's moral mean, and in the same way, of the absolute moral mean.
SCENARIO 2: NO MORAL MEAN EXISTS. SUBJECTIVE MORAL BELIEF GOVERNS THE ENTIRE HUMAN POPULATION.
With the alternative, that being a subjective morality, you might expect to see moderate variation within a group of people (defined as a culture or society) due to common environmental and biological factors, but wide variation between groups. That is, one would expect to find core moral values (murder, cowardice) being accepted as "moral" in one major population and not in another. Assuming these cultures eventually interact (by overcoming geographic and travel limitations), and that enough variation is in place, most immigrants from other cultures would be label psychopaths (or sociopaths), since their moral belief would deviate so greatly from culture to culture.
In this scenario, you would expect to see an equal number of people with an equal number of differences, with no real mean, or common morality, between groups (specifically between the larger "umbrella" groups).
CONCLUSION?
I would argue that our world looks exactly like scenario 1, and nothing like scenario 2. We have major cultural groups that deviate only slightly, if not at all, on the "major" morals, but increasingly more deviation in the lesser morals, with the most deviation on the superficial moral values (e.g. table manners). I also see the typical immigrant from the East or Middle East, fitting well into the culture (they are not seen as psychopaths), but rather stick out due to the more superficial moral beliefs. You could take a man from a rural farm in China, having no interaction with Western society, and drop him in the middle of Phoenix, Arizona, and he would still recognize the major moral beliefs.
You also might try to contribute this moral mean to globalization, societies and cultures adopting common morality as they are forced together, but this does seem adequate for overcoming total moral subjectivity, and it wouldn't explain why common morality sustains even into the ancient past. Yes, Aztecs practiced human sacrifice, but it was under the higher moral context of cultural preservation and protection. Murder, in the traditional sense, was still considered morally wrong. On the same token, relatively speaking, Christians show very little moral deviation from one another, and, by virtue of the size of the group (~1/3 the world's population) show only a lesser deviation from the morality of other major cultures/religions. Atheists and non-religious types, constituting a much smaller population (2% and 13% respectively), would be expected to deviate further from that mean (in ratio to the total population), but possibly closer to the mean due to their roots in the common parent culture, the broader philosophy of post-modernism.
You might also argue that social and biological evolution have created a certain "common morality", developed by the drive to survive and procreate, but I would argue that that mechanism doesn't adequately explain all the deviations of morality, nor does evolution work exactly that way in the first place. However, even if you do subscribe to the social evolution theory, you must still admit that, as common morality among societies starts to imply a mean, that it still implies a universal morality, necessarily independent from any one culture's morals. If survival is qualified by how closely a society lives in accordance with that mean (doesn't cause or receive friction), then there is another argument for absolute morality.
Anyway, I don't think this is a proof of any kind, but I think the fact that the entire human population seems to hover around a moral mean is a very strong suggestion for the necessary existance of an objective morality. This, of course, shouldn't be taken as a jump into Christianity (yet), but you can see it leads in that general direction.
